Fact-checking Trump’s claims at Madison Square Garden rally

Former President Donald Trump hammered an anti-immigration theme in his closing argument pitch to voters Oct. 27 at New York Metropolis’s Madison Sq. Backyard.

WATCH: Trump’s Madison Sq. Backyard rally highlights crude and racist insults

However earlier than Trump spoke, the occasion made headlines for a sequence of racist jokes by comic Tony Hinchcliffe. He referred to as Puerto Rico an “island of rubbish” and disparaged Black People, Latinos and Jewish individuals. Democrats and not less than two Florida Republicans, together with Sen. Rick Scott, swiftly condemned Hinchcliffe’s remarks about Puerto Rico.

“This joke doesn’t replicate the views of President Trump or the marketing campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump marketing campaign stated in a press release after the rally addressing the comic’s remark about Puerto Rico.

On the rally, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, stated he presided over the securest border in American historical past (he didn’t), that the Federal Emergency Administration Company didn’t ship hurricane aid as a result of the federal government spent its cash bringing immigrants into the nation illegally (it didn’t) and that overseas nations have been emptying their prisons and sending convicts to america (they’re not).

A gaggle of audio system preceded Trump, together with Trump’s operating mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., Trump’s spouse, Melania, his daughter-in-law and Republican Nationwide Committee co-Chair Lara Trump, U.S. Home Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Final Preventing Championship CEO Dana White, skilled wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox Information host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson riffed about Harris’ potential victory marking “the primary Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Harris identifies as a Black girl of multicultural descent; her mom was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica.

Trump however stated the Republican Occasion he leads “has actually change into the get together of inclusion, and there’s one thing very good about that.”

Trump’s selection of New York Metropolis as a rally website might have challenged political logic; New York, as a state, has voted for the Democratic candidate for president for many years, although Madison Sq. Backyard has hosted main political occasions for greater than a century. Showing in New York Metropolis additionally positioned Trump within the yard of officers whom he often has criticized, together with District Lawyer Alvin Bragg who obtained a 34-count felony conviction towards Trump for falsifying enterprise data.

Listed here are eight claims we fact-checked.

Immigration

Trump stated Harris “has imported prison migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and psychological establishments from all around the globe, from Venezuela to the Congo.”

Pants on Hearth! There isn’t a proof that international locations are emptying their prisons — or psychological establishments and sending individuals to illegally migrate to the U.S.

Immigration officers arrested about 108,000 noncitizens with prison convictions (whether or not within the U.S. or overseas) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal knowledge exhibits. That accounts for individuals stopped at and between ports of entry. Not everybody was let in.

Trump stated, “I’ll invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”

Authorized specialists informed PolitiFact that Trump doesn’t have the authority to make use of the legislation to hold out mass deportations and that invoking it might result in authorized challenges.

The Alien Enemies Act lets a president rapidly deport noncitizens with out due course of if they’re from a rustic at battle with the U.S.

The legislation has been used solely 3 times in U.S. historical past, all throughout wartime. The final time the act was invoked was throughout World Conflict II, and it was used to position noncitizens from Japan, Germany and Italy in internment camps.

Trump stated, “Consider this: 325,000 kids are lacking, lifeless, intercourse slaves, or slaves. They got here by means of the open border and so they’re gone.”

This can be a distortion of federal knowledge about migrant kids.

An August federal oversight report about unaccompanied minors launched from federal authorities custody stated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not served a “Discover to Seem” to greater than 291,000 unaccompanied minors, as of Could. (A discover to seem is a charging doc authorities difficulty and file in immigration courtroom to begin elimination proceedings.)

WATCH: Harris courts voters from throughout the aisle as Trump stokes fears on crime and immigration

The report stated that unaccompanied kids “who don’t seem for courtroom are thought-about at larger danger for trafficking, exploitation, or compelled labor.” The report doesn’t state what number of kids have really been trafficked.

The report led Republican lawmakers and conservative information shops to say that ICE “misplaced” the youngsters or that they’re “lacking.” However that’s not what it stated.

Trump stated Harris “vowed to abolish” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

False.

As a U.S. senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration insurance policies, together with a coverage that led to household separations on the border. In that context, Harris stated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s perform must be reexamined and that “we have to most likely even take into consideration ranging from scratch.” However Harris didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris additionally stated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a job and will exist.

Financial system

Trump stated Harris “forged the deciding vote that launched the worst inflation within the historical past of our nation. She value the everyday American household over $3,000 in a brief interval, however over $30,000 during the last three years.”

Largely False. Harris forged the tiebreaking vote on the movement to proceed to a last Senate vote on the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a coronavirus pandemic aid invoice.

An ideologically numerous cross-section of economists agrees that the American Rescue Plan added a few proportion factors to inflation, however didn’t trigger the broader spike. The first causes, they are saying, have been provide chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Yr-over-year inflation peaked in 2022 at about 9 %. That makes it the worst annual charge in 40 years, however not the worst in American historical past.

The $28,000 enhance is a reputable estimate of how a lot further households have paid for purchases since Biden took workplace. However that determine ignores that wage good points have evened out a lot — or relying on the time-frame, all — of these elevated prices.

READ MORE: U.S. inflation drops to lowest level in 3 years at 2.4 %, some value pressures stay

LGBTQ+ points

Trump stated Harris “referred to as without spending a dime intercourse change operations on unlawful aliens in detention at taxpayer expense.”

The assertion wants clarification, so we rated it Largely True.

Harris’ historical past on this subject goes again to when she was California’s lawyer normal and represented the state’s corrections division because it sought to dam a decrease courtroom order requiring the company to offer gender-affirming surgical procedure to a transgender inmate.

Throughout her run for president within the 2019 Democratic major, Harris stated she favored entry to gender-affirming surgical procedure for individuals in prisons and immigration detention. Harris has not campaigned on this difficulty in 2024, however when requested about it throughout a Fox Information interview Oct. 16, she stated, “I’ll observe the legislation.”

Federal legislation requires that prisons present essential medical care to inmates, and a number of other courts have dominated that gender-affirming care, together with surgical procedure, is included. Regardless of these courtroom rulings, entry to gender-affirming surgical procedure in prisons is proscribed, and the variety of transgender prisoners in federal prisons who’ve obtained it’s minuscule — two.

We discovered no document of gender-affirming surgical procedures being supplied in immigration detention.

Crime and weapons

Trump stated Harris “pledged to confiscate your weapons” and “endorsed a complete ban on handgun possession.”

This distorts Harris’ present stance.

As a 2019 presidential major candidate, Harris stated, “I assist a compulsory gun buyback program” for assault weapons. She now not helps this coverage, which might not have utilized to handguns, the preferred firearms.

READ MORE: DNC workplace capturing suspect had greater than 120 weapons in his Arizona house, officers discover

The Harris marketing campaign informed The New York Occasions that she helps banning assault weapons however not a requirement to promote them to the federal authorities. As vp, Harris has urged states to go pink flag legal guidelines and supported federal gun security laws that included funding for psychological well being and college safety sources.

There may be proof that she supported a gun ban, however that was restricted to 1 metropolis practically 20 years in the past. In 2005 when Harris was the San Francisco district lawyer, she supported a poll measure that may have banned metropolis residents from proudly owning handguns. Voters accredited the measure, however the courts struck it down.

Trump stated, “Your crime is thru the roof” and that newly launched statistics confirmed that “crime was up 45 %” beneath the Biden-Harris administration.

Trump might have meant to say 4.5 %, a determine that has been cited in some media accounts sympathetic to Trump. However even that decrease determine can be deceptive.

This remark was a part of a dialogue by Trump of an change he had with ABC Information’ David Muir in the course of the Sept. 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, by which Muir stated crime had declined and Trump insisted that crime had elevated.

On the whole, FBI annual knowledge has proven a decline in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. A number of nongovernmental crime statistics analyses additionally discovered violent crime declined in 2023 and 2024.

In October, it was reported that the FBI had up to date its violent crime knowledge to be extra full, a regular annual course of. The up to date knowledge led some commentators to say this meant crime had elevated between 2021 and 2022; slightly than being down by 2.1 %, some stated, it was up by 4.5 % between these two years, with hundreds of latest violent crimes.

Nevertheless, crime specialists together with Jeff Asher of JH Analytics stated this can be a statistical artifact.

That’s as a result of the baseline for this comparability is the information for 2021, which Asher and different crime specialists say is unreliable as a result of the FBI switched crime reporting programs that 12 months and compliance by native police departments plummeted. (The issue has been fastened within the annual knowledge for later years.)

Asher described the revisions launched in October as unusually massive, and for unclear causes. However he wrote that “the FBI’s 2023 estimates present a continued small decline in violent crime with a traditionally massive decline in homicide.”